Time to Face Facts: Gov’t is Bankrupt

The United States is functionally bankrupt. Our collective capacity to deal with this astonishing fact is seemingly nonexistent. Our national politics have become show business, exhibiting a complete refusal to strategically respond to this reality.

Let’s look at the simple numbers of our national debt. Our on-the-books national debt is $11.6 trillion. But off-the-books federal debt, including Medicare and Social Security, is $107 trillion. This is not a made-up number; this is the money we should have in the bank, according to the federal government’s own accountants, to pay for our current promises to our retirees and future retirees, and this doesn’t include unfunded obligations that we have to the pensions and benefits promised to federal workers and veterans. Nor does it include huge unfunded pension and benefit obligations for other public employees at levels below the federal government.

North Carolina has its own unfunded liability for retiree health benefits of $29 billion(and growing) along with massive amounts of state and local government debt. Government spending has bankrupted this nation, and all we here from DC is plans to further increase gov’t debt, and in Raleigh our state leaders have doubled state debt in the last seven years.

Such is the fate of the welfare state, or as Bastiat put it: “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

Reader Interactions

Discussion

now I see why the Obama health care plan would severely restrict health care to the older members of the population. AS soon as they die off their retirement costs go away and thus decreasing the burden of debt for supporting our senior Americans.Also, once they die, the death taxes would provide another cash cow for the bureaucrats! It’s a win-win for the fat cat politicians and and lose-lose for the rest of us!

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